Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2013 21:34:28 GMT -8
All's fair in
For any other summer camp, a competition between cabins at the archery fields might be fun. A little bit of rivalry, a matching of skills for a trophy easily won, or a teaching experience where counselors would instruct their temporary charges in a - very sanitized, Toni thought - version of the art of archery. Colin Brannon, who she called 'Dad' only when her mother was around, had sent all four Brannon children to a summer camp one year, where they terrorized the counselors. It had been two years before her official claiming, and the archery lessons were the only thing she excelled in during the whole two months of abandonment.
At Camp Half Blood, two cabins on the archery field looked more like full-on warfare than playtime. Children of Hephaestus liked to modify their arrows to . . . anything they could think of, usually. Sometimes the targets looked like they belonged in a paintball tournament, but they also ended up on fire from some of the modifications. A particularly sneaky child of Hades or Hecate might attach a spell to their arrows, but that was generally considered poor form. "Unsportsmanlike", bystanders would call it, and if Apollo was the other cabin in play, such behavior would justify retaliation. Usually the offending cabin could escape with a rhyming hex that would wear off after a few hours, but every once in a while, Apollo cabin as a whole would swear off Healing powers to teach a lesson. These lessons didn't usually last long, and someone from the Big House would intervene if things got too out of hand.
Among demigods, the archery fields were a place to play war games. For the Hunters of Artemis, it was a place to trounce uppity demigods who though they could outshoot the disciples of the goddess Artemis, who invented archery in her spare time. (Children of Apollo would argue - Apollo's progeny had a very contentious relationship with the Hunters, in general. Putting the two groups together was not recommended for anything but the nightly bonfire.)
Putting the two groups together was not recommended for anything but the nightly bonfire.
Yet here they were, in the archery field. The Hunters outnumbered the children of Apollo, which didn't deter the demigods. Hunters were more disciplined than Apollo's brood. Toni ignored the girls on the other end of the field in favor of sliding on her own equipment along with her siblings. From the tooled leather bracers she had made in Arts and Crafts (leather was one of her least favorite materials to work with) to the archery gloves she had requested for Christmas last year, her arms were well protected from errant bowstrings. These she could pull from the box of Apollo archery equipment - inelegant, maybe, but the system worked. She passed one of her siblings his guards as she passed him, and stepped over to the bows. Each cabin had their own rack of bows (even if some of them were hideously underused), and one camper had already triggered Apollo's rack. When no one was practicing, none of the bows were available, but each cabin had a code they could input to summon their weapons.
Toni's bow was a recurve, designed to put less stress on the bowstring when it was strung for long periods of time. It was a third smaller than a longbow, and packed just as much power as the original model. It was mundane, something she had begun using from the Apollo cabin stash when she first arrived. If she could get her hands on one of the horns from a monster - say the Minotaur, if it ever reformed, or an ophiotaurus - she would use it in a magical bow. Something she could trigger from a dormant form (maybe an earring; she liked earrings) into a useable weapon. She glared at the Hunters enviously; their gear was enchanted, and therefore never more than a thought away. Her quiver was enchanted, made from the spoils of a chimaera she had killed when she was sixteen. Its dormant form was a plain feather pendant, no more valuable than a nickel-plated souvenir bit of trash. Most of the quivers found at Camp Half-Blood were heavily influenced by the Greek, but given that Toni'd had complete control over the design of her quiver, it looked more like something from the Woods of Lorien.
She hummed lightly as she unclipped the pendant from her camp necklace - four beads, as of this year - and flicked it over her shoulder. It morphed into shape in the air, finishing its transformation just in time for Toni to fit her arm through the strap to catch it. The weight still caught her by surprise - she hadn't been using it very long, and with several dozen arrows inside, it was heavier than a tiny pendant made her think. A few Hunters snickered as she almost dropped her quiver, and she fixed them with poisonous glares, slinging the heavy thing over her left shoulder. Bow in hand, she moved to a place where both Hunters and Campers could see - and hear - her. Time to get this thing stuck.
"Y'know the usual rules. No trick arrows, no special fletching, no unusual heads. Aluminum bodkins, mundane fletching. No. Shooting. Each. Other." She leveled a steely glare at a few smirking contestants - campers and Hunters combined. The formidable look was a direct odds to her light Southern drawl, being something she had cultivated once named Apollo Cabin Leader. "We begin with Target Shooting; three arrows apiece. Campers get the targets to the east, Hunters get the targets to the west. No fighting over targets, and no targeting someone else's target. Not even you, Angie." (Angelica Baron was a new Hunter, a daughter of Apollo before she swore off sex and romance. Of all the Hunters present, she was the one Toni liked best - for a given value of 'like'.)
Toni only concerned herself with her siblings. The Hunters had their own hierarchy, and as the rules had been settled prior to today's meeting, she didn't want to appear to pay attention to their conference.
Ensemble
1012 Words
